It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library, or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

Spent the week, with the help of my mother who came up from FLA, paring down, moving things out, re-organizing and cleaning the place in preparation for another little one soon. Her workmanship and inexhaustibility with regard to such things is incredible and inspiring. It was a great help.

By the end of the weekend though I was pretty spent. Had to work a gig Saturday night and just before leaving started seeing flashes of something happening in Charlottesville. But I resisted following the up-to-the-second Twitter reports of what probably was going to be more really depressing shit. I know I'll dive in and end up deep down the rabbit hole with thoughts pinging around like a pinball game, making historical, political and societal connections, which I just didn't have the memory space to process properly then. So I left it until Sunday morning.

I afforded myself an opportunity to walk around the Village by leaving the house late Saturday afternoon to give myself some time before the gig, which was exactly what I needed. Spent most of that capital on a lavish half hour at one of my favorite places in the City, the East Village Bookstore. As is always the case when having done so, it could easily result in walking out with a sack full of used books. Time constraints made me settle for two.

There was this oversized, serious-looking volume whose title just jumped out at me. It was an official government publication from 1920 entitled, "Revolutionary Radicalism - Part Two 'Constructive Measures' Vol. III," Report of the Joint Legislative Committee of New York Investigating Seditious Activities. WTF? This is straight-up, bound pages of pure, collected Red Scare material that would reverberate for decades to come. Just perusing it was fascinating. Great detail given to radical communist, socialist and union groups all over New York City (and other place in the state), with descriptions of neighborhood meetings. To offset the severity of such a blatant Big Brother tome, I also reached for the easy ride of celebrated Canadian sports writer and novelist Scott Young's book on his rockstar son Neil's life, their relationship and his own complicated family dynamic.

But man, what a monstrosity. The fucking thing is over 1100 pages long! And as typical with these clandestine, hallowed reports, there's no personal accountability to be found anywhere in terms of who actually contributed to writing and collecting the vast material. There was no masthead to speak of. And therein is the cloaked secrecy that runs at the heart of these very serious inquisitions. The behemoth Institution shall not be questioned, or its findings, or the authors of its contents ever be known to you, peasants. Ever. We are the All-knowing, All-good and All-powerful, here to keep you in fear save you from evil, in this case revolutionary radicalism.

To think of the amount of resources, manpower and institutional muscle it must have required to spy on and infiltrate groups of people. And what were these people doing that were deemed so dangerous? Basically calling attention to the folly of militarism and imperialism, the power that concentrated wealth was having over the vaunted democracy of which we were supposed to be a beacon to the world and the grave economic inequality and lack of welfare programs that had been constricting the lives of the working class, who were the backbone of the ever-expanding country. That's dangerous, seditious? No, that's honorable, magnanimous. Further proof that all of our government institutions are the domain of the corporate and banking cabals. Am looking forward to thumbing through it more when I have a chance.

So much to be said about the Charlottesville, of which I haven't had the time to put into words. But as usual, when it comes to the media, malpractice is basically the only thing "the news" can do anymore, when they're not running infotainment and corporate and government press releases (and there are those who snicker at Russian and China for their propaganda - heh).

In "For Media, Driving Into a Crowd of Protesters Is a ‘Clash’" Adam Johnson points out how egregious the editors of the big publications are. I would go further - they're spineless. They consistently refuse to finger and call out culprits and offenders. The feckless media are so afraid to do real journalism and instead hide behind a false sense of desperately seeking to appear balanced.

The Washington Post, Boston Globe, AOL News, The Hill, BBC and Sky News UK all chose to frame the ramming of a car into anti-fascist protesters as “clashes.”

The BBC’s breaking news tweet, “One dead amid clashes between US white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville,” is an extremely odd way to describe a person driving a car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters—as was AOL’s “1 Dead, 34 Injured in Clashes at Virginia Rally.”

The term “clashes”—as FAIR (10/14/15) has noted before—is a term designed to obscure blame, presenting a picture of two equal sides engaging in violent activities. Reading “one dead” after “clashes” at a white nationalist rally gives us no idea who died, or who did the killing.

(Alternatively, one can veil responsibility by attributing agency to an inanimate object and disembodied emotions, as with the New York Times' headline, “Car Plows Into Crowd as Racial Tensions Boil Over in Virginia.”)

The media's shirking of its journalistic duty is just endemic of a society that has succumbed to Huxley's "Brave New World" prediction that it would be entertainment, gadgets and pills that would render us too passive to approach truths head on, while we hide away in the fun, fun, fun of our Farcebook scrolling threads.

Wound down the weekend with a pasta dinner, and my partner wanting to turn on the tv for the first time in well over a month. Well, it's not really tv. We have an internet tv, so we watch whatever we want that's available online (which is pretty much everything, that I'd want to see anyway) whenever we want, and occasionally flick through the three channels of local cable tv and PBS we get from rabbit ears and of course Netflix. The corporate media monopolies can't reduce their cable tv subscription prices low enough for me to go back to that garbage.

She put on a PBS special on the Summer of Love. I just wanted to follow the #Charlottesville hashtag and the protests in NYC that were happening. But of course, being it was the 60's, my deep soul connection, I was helpless toward the images, music and dialogue and was immediately transfixed to the hippie dream of those days.

Folks, I have to admit - and yes, I was drinking a little red wine - but anytime I start seeing footage of that beautiful, positive, idealistic time, my heart begins to soar and at various intervals I get a little choked up.

Then I'll ruminate on the whole thing and where we are today, with a sense of defiant bittersweetness mixed with a peace about the universal truths that were being put down then, which are still resonant today.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Steely Dan "The Royal Scam"

Reading/Browsing List:
"Fire In The Streets: America in the 60's" Milton Viorst
"Neil and Me" Scott Young
"Tropic Of Capricorn" Henry Miller

Vegetarian Summer Pasta Primavera (senza formaggio)
(we've gone garlic scape crazy this season, and loving it)

Pesto: combine chopped garlic scape chutes and toasted pine nuts in food processor, with olive oil.

Sautee sundried tomato and baby bella mushrooms in small pan.

In another pot steam fresh coarsely chopped carrots and collard greens.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger